Use your slow periods to prepare for the busy periods

We live near a school where parking can be a headache during school times. No big deal since I work at home, but I've been needing a lot of mulch for the garden.

Mulch that needs a large parking spot to be dropped off in.

I could pay and have it delivered over the weekend but there's a free drop-off service that's crazy good here (Chipdrop). The problem with the free service is that I can't schedule it, they just show up.

Luckily school is ending soon which means our street will go back to being 99% open during the week. That gives me three months to get a free drop-off (or two or three).

Knowing that, if I get enough mulch to last until next summer then I won't have to think about it for a year.

This implied cyclical schedule is only apparent by paying attention to how our resources vary (parking spaces, mulch), what the constraint is (parking spaces), and optimizing the system as a whole for the constraint.

Right now, summer is a good time for the majority of Shopify stores to be planning for the winter busy season. Your constraint is most likely time/energy for marketing. So if it's not fully committed this summer, it would be best to use it now before the busy season takes it all.

There's tons of projects you can start work on now like:

This stuff is not easy to work on during the busy season so getting it done now can really improve operations.

Eric Davis

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